


A Priest's Miscellany: Evocation

by thural



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, M/M, Rituals, dick almost literally too bomb
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-04
Updated: 2014-06-04
Packaged: 2018-02-03 07:34:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1736420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thural/pseuds/thural
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The purpose was [<i>text illegible</i>] need. The solitary priest who becomes a sac[<i>text illegible</i>] called by many titles after this: called Evening-Star's Hand, High One Above The Flood. He did not return to his place within the community if he survived.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Priest's Miscellany: Evocation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i think this is not kiyoshi-kiyoshi. not kiyoshi teppei from basketballs: the show. maybe it is his great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandfather.
> 
> i needed a break from the other thing i was writing b/c i have to fix a bunch of stuff in it so here is this appalling thing instead.
> 
> the next chapter is p much just going to be a lot of dickings. just a big festival of dongs and doin the sticky wiggle waltz.

 

  
 _Origin, Facing North, of the Drowning God_

_The first sign is the fungus in the fields which devours the  
_ _soil. It travels to the forest. It is the second sign, that birdcalls_  
 _cease. The third sign, called Aspect Of Silence, is when the_  
 _noise of insects_ [lit. "mites and forest mites"] _becomes silent._  
 _Before this face of the god_ [e.g. the 'Aspect Of Silence'] _the_  
 _people perish, they wither and are devoured._

 

He kept up the same friendly smile as the farmer turned over the cut stem of buckwheat to show the furry whiteness feathering the underside of the leaves.

"Do you know if it's just your field?"

"Tanaka said he had a bad field."

"...Just Tanaka? Did he see this too?" He pointed at the mold.

The farmer blinked, his jaw rolling. "I didn't show anyone else."

"I mean did he see this stuff on his crops?"

"Dunno."

The solitary priest performed a silent calculation in his mind. If Tanaka's field was the same, then the time was much shorter. If it wasn't, then there were a few more days. But not enough to send a request for assistance.

At the start of his twenty-third summer Kiyoshi felt the chill of shadow pass over him on a fair fine morning. A clutch, autonomic, that tightened the tongue and left his back curled in reflex. The idea of what it would cost him didn't scare him; here he was firm, with determination like an iron arch in his heart to bear the weight of this responsibility. But he'd never done an evocation before, and it made a man's guts shiver to think of the many ways it could go wrong. 

 

* * *

 

 

_[To Gain The Aid Of] Uaruun Who Protects Us_

_Uaruun the Warrior thirsts, She swallows the waters. The_  
 _Water-swallower will send Her cupbearer when her thirst is_  
 _great. To invite the cupbearer, the rite begins with, first, to_  
 _show the quality of the water._

 

After collecting some things, he walked back with the farmer, Hideo. It was a substantial journey and as the sun ascended Kiyoshi got hotter and hotter until he had to start mopping the sweat from his brow with his sacred sleeves. He was incredibly blithe about this, waving off Hideo's concerns with a grin and a vow that it isn't the garment which serves the gods; it is the man inside. The rice paddies stretched nearly right up to the woods and the water was high in their ruts, nearly up to the verge. Hideo's buckwheat fields came into view: a dense swathe of green, the white flowers fading before they fell so that the heads of the stems were touched with unnatural brown. The big, heart-shaped leaves in this section didn't show any other signs of disorder. 

Hideo took him to the northern side of the field and as they proceeded Kiyoshi saw the change in the plants, how the leaves began to droop as if weighted with rain. It weighed upon his heart in the same way. His smile collapsed as they came to the point where Kiyoshi could see not only mold on the leaves, but faintly grey upon the soil itself.

The origin of the drowning god, devourer, imbalancer.

 He pulled out a leather-wrapped bundle from his waist. He unfurled the thongs that bound it and spread it open: five tubes made of copper, with stoppers made of pressed reeds and oiled with bear fat until they rejected moisture.

One by one he uncorked and pressed these into the dirt and filled them, and stoppered them, and wrapped the bundle back up and tied it to the sash of his indigo habit. His unwavering friendly smile put Hideo at ease. He felt confident that the priest, however young, would turn the white moss; that was what he learned from his father and so on from prior fathers and mothers in sustenance. Of course he did not know how; that was was a divine mystery of the sort that justified his tithe to the temple every year.

* * *

First when Kiyoshi returned he took out the scrolls that explained the ritual in detail and read them over and over, burning wax candles, then tallow ones.

The soil he already had and for that part, he was confident. Then he memorized the words of the prayers and defiled the orderliness of his apothecary jars to lay out all that would be required: buckwheat, rice straw, the mountain herb whose sharp smell made him sneeze as soon as he opened the jar, ash, volcanic dust, the heavy silvery liquid which he never touched with bare skin, and all of the sugar he had. The sugar was the most costly. Using it here, when he would not have more, meant he would be severely impaired when assisting with swelling wounds and suppuration. He laid out many layers of uncolored, fine silk cloth, which he had so often wished to use for bandages.

Next he brought everything to the altar. A sword hung there on a wooden stand. It had never been used - by "used" it was understood without words to mean "in a practical way." It was not a practical artifact. Its hilt in white manta skin, its scabbard of innumerable colored pearls glued to cypress, without a horn holder to tie it to a belt, without guard, also of a difficult length - shorter than the swords used by actual fighters in the armies and fiefs, longer than any dagger, it was at once impossible to conceal and deficient in attack range.

The blade was immaculately clean and sharp enough to shave the hair from a boy's arm. Kiyoshi cleaned it at the new moon with a sharp-scented oil.

In the censer before the sword - the sword which was the engagement of Uaruun - he started a fire of rice straw and piled in the mountain herb, which sent up a great quantity of dense, dark-grey, heavily-scented smoke. It filled the small square temple. Kiyoshi with his eyes watering poured in the first ladle of sugar in the funereal darkness of pre-dawn, the cold of pre-dawn, against the ritual egress of desperation.

The sickly-sweet smell persisted for a long time. Focus crept upon Kiyoshi like dawn: at first he remember the steps and performed them, each in an agony of concern. Then as progress caught him he let it drag him along with its comfortable underlight of what to do next, what to remember next. By the third ladle of sugar he didn't feel like he was the one who moved his hand. He was at the end of a cord whose other end was held by someone wiser. It was not a feeling of certainty but of inevitability that moved him. He was moved.

Into this space conscious thoughts did not intrude. So he was no longer Kiyoshi who grew up in a village with other village children; he had never laughed; he had never seen the sun on Riko's hair. It was the correct time to prepare the soil, stone, and pounder.

The heavy stone with its face shallowly indented was set upon a wooden cradle to help move it from place to place. There was a hole cut or worn through it, from the center of its basin to a little outlet on the side. This had a violet cloth stuffed into it. He shifted the stone before the altar and laid down a layer of silk and scattered volcanic dust over it. A second layer went down and over this one he scattered sugar. A third layer, a fourth, and a fifth went down, and then he uncorked the copper tubes and carefully mounded the wet dirt in the middle of the cloth. Gathering up all the cloth he folded it over the soil, then turned it a quarter, folded over again, another turn, another fold, and continued until he could go no further.

Then he stood, picked up the long wooden pounder, and raised it to strike.

A prayer went with the long hour of pounding which followed: a plea for protection, a recitation of the worthiness of the subjugate people. Kiyoshi mouthed the words voicelessly as he struck the bundle over and over and over again, driving the water out from the soil through the silk. The rhythmic and resonant strike of the wood made his hands numb. The pounder was made for a smaller priest, and he had to bend to make full use of it and drive it down with the heel of his palm. He noted the fatigue and stiffness rising and would deal with them later. It was necessary to pound until the silk felt dry to the touch.

In the smoke and darkness - cut only by the candles on the altar - Kiyoshi could barely see the bundle below him. He simply continued to work, without thought and without hesitation or hurry. The sky began to lighten outside. Something, a cold breeze or an internal response,  made him think to drop to his knees and test the top of the bundle. It was now pounded to the shape of the basin. The cloth felt as wet as morning air. Was it enough?

He felt for the cloth tucked into the outlet. It was soaked through and he could smell the sweetness of the water on his fingertips. He pulled it free and brought it to the altar and wrung it over the ceramic saucer there, and kept wringing until it gave up no more moisture. Then he flapped it out and folded it into quarters and laid it by the saucer: a thin, durable linen cloth, dyed with _shikon_ and never exposed to the sun.

Into the next saucer he poured a measure of buckwheat, and into the weathered bronze cup with its long handles on each side he poured the heavy silver fluid. These were the offerings: sweet water from the soil, good grain, liquid metal to repair Her weapons.

He was wrung as the cloth but this was the critical moment and his focus could not waver now.

With the ash he banked the fire in the censer. Then he reached in, feeling the heat of the censer's iron walls around him. A bead of sweat ran down the inside of his arm within his loose robes. He trembled with unwillingness. It had to be banished, which he did with a strong admonition, and then he grasped a handful of ash and cinders. The pain crushed a gasp from him. He spread this upon the pounded bundle within the stone basin and fought to keep from shaking out his burned hand and pressing it to the cool rock.

What followed was hours of prayer: to kneel and speak the prayer of invitation as long as he could, his burned hand turned palm up on his lap, eyes closed, head bowed. The dawn vanished behind an overcast sky and it began to rain, windlessly. Kiyoshi fought against the lulling sound of raindrops upon the roof. He endured until a chilly, dark noon, when the prayers turned to formless mumbling on his lips, and he fell asleep where he sat. 

 

* * *

 

_Cupbearer of Uaruun_

_The cupbearer is made of lode-silver_ [considered to be the  
material the moon is made out of.]  _Without words, he speaks._  
 _Without motion, he walks. He drains the soil of sweet water_  
 _for the Water-swallower. His vessel is_

 

Kiyoshi awoke with a start and a sense of misery: he had fallen asleep and all his effort was wasted. Before despair overtook him he realized that he was not alone. 

A body lay behind his body, outstretched on the floor of the temple. A hand curled around his outstretched hand, the thumb against his wounds. An arm looped his waist, long, broad, and pale against the dark fabric.

The birds he heard chattering outside were night birds. Awkwardly, mystified, he began to pull away. While large hands clung to him, he was not prevented. When he sat up and looked, he saw it was a man: impossibly even larger than Kiyoshi himself and completely naked, with hair tousled across his face. Impossible-colored hair, like it had been colored with  _shinkon_. The same color dusted his long legs and the area around his genitals.

Kiyoshi's eyes widened. A startled noise escaped him. The eyes that opened at that were a deep purple, and Kiyoshi suddenly wondered that he could see it. Someone had relit the candles upon the altar and the saucer of water had been thrown upon the floor.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh yeah ps _shinkon_ is a real, traditional dye. it has another name: _murasaki_. as you might expect, things dyed with this turn out a soft purple.


End file.
